Why Use HubSpot Marketing Hub with SalesForce?

Salesforce is the most popular sales tool on the planet, used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies, as well as numerous mid-market and small-to-medium businesses. It began as an easy-to-use sales tool before evolving into an all-encompassing CRM system that includes marketing functionality, following a range of acquisitions. Today, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Suite offers a fantastic array of marketing products, but can take a lot of time to learn and implement. Moreover, purchasing the full suite of marketing products Salesforce has acquired over the years can be cost-prohibitive for some companies, as licensing fees can quickly escalate into tens of thousands per month.

Not all companies choose to purchase every product within the Marketing Cloud suite, resulting in the absence of an all-in-one marketing platform alongside their CRM. This, coupled with the ease of use of the HubSpot Marketing Hub, its deep integration with Salesforce, HubSpot's specialist marketing expertise, and much lower licensing costs, is why many companies using Salesforce opt to augment their capabilities with the power of HubSpot Marketing Hub.

In this blog post we shall compare Salesforce Marketing Cloud with HubSpot Marketing Hub and also discuss the integration app between Salesforce and HubSpot which is currently used by over 10,000 companies around the world. 

Salesforce Marketing Products:

Salesforce has significantly enhanced its Marketing Cloud capabilities through a series of strategic acquisitions, including ExactTarget, Krux, Buddy Media, Pardot, Radian6, Rebel, Datorama, and Demandware. These acquisitions have been integrated and rebranded as key components of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, each tailored to meet unique marketing challenges and available with a variety of licensing options. Salesforce also provides bundled pricing options for customers who purchase multiple marketing products. Here is a list of a list of Salesforce Marketing products as they are known today within the Marketing Cloud.

Marketing Cloud Engagement

• Email Marketing: Offers tools to create, send, and track email campaigns at scale.
• Content Creation: Enables the creation of dynamic, personalised content that resonates with the audience.
• Robust Analytics: Provides comprehensive analytics to track campaign performance and user engagement.
• Comprehensive Campaign Management: Allows for the management of multi-channel marketing campaigns from a single platform.
• Enhanced Customer Engagement: Personalises customer interaction across digital channels, enhancing the overall customer experience.
• Costs: Starting at £1,200 per month 

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement 

• Lead Nurturing and Scoring: Helps in developing leads until they are sales-ready, using automated lead scoring based on engagement.
• Engagement History Dashboards: Offers visual tools to track interactions and engagement across campaigns.
• Campaign Reporting and Insights: Delivers insights into campaign performance to help refine strategies and improve outcomes.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment: Integrates deeply with Salesforce CRM to align sales and marketing efforts, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness.
• Targeted Account-Based Marketing: Supports ABM strategies by providing tools that cater to high-value accounts with personalised marketing tactics.
• Costs: Starting at £1,200 per month

Data Cloud for Marketing

• Single Customer Profile: Unifies all customer data into a comprehensive profile for better targeting and personalisation.
• AI-Driven Insights: Leverages AI to scale insights and improve decision-making processes based on unified data.
• Data Activation: Allows businesses to leverage their entire data ecosystem for targeted marketing efforts.
• Enhanced Customer Understanding: Provides a 360-degree view of the customer, enabling better personalisation and customer journey optimisation.
• Costs: Start at £100,00 per year.
  

Marketing Cloud Personalisation (Starting at £100,000 per year)

• Web and Email Personalisation: Tailors content and offers to individual preferences and behaviors across web and email.
• Segmentation and Decisioning: A rule-based engines for customer segmentation and deploys A/B/N testing to optimise strategies.
• Product and Content Recommendations: Suggests products or content dynamically based on customer data and interaction history.
• Real-Time Personalisation: Automates personalised offers in real-time, enhancing the relevance of interactions across the customer journey.
• Increased Conversion Rates: Boosts engagement and conversions through highly tailored content and recommendations.
• Costs: Starting at £100,000 per year.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence

• Journey Orchestration: Designs and manages customer journeys across marketing, advertising, commerce, and service.
• Personalised Customer Experiences: Creates unique experiences tailored to individual customer needs and preferences.
• Cross-Channel Coordination: Ensures consistent and cohesive marketing messages across all channels.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on deep analytics and performance metrics.
• Costs: Starting at £2,400 Per Year
  

The origins backstory of Salesforce Marketing Hub

Salesforce has acquired several companies over the years to build out its Marketing Cloud offerings. Here are some of the notable acquisitions and the companies that Salesforce purchased to enhance its Marketing Cloud capabilities:

1. ExactTarget - Acquired in 2013, ExactTarget formed the core of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It provided robust email marketing capabilities and was one of the largest acquisitions by Salesforce at that time.

2. Krux - Purchased in 2016, Krux was a leading data management platform, which later became Salesforce Data Management Platform, part of the Marketing Cloud's data and audience segmentation tools.

3. Buddy Media - Acquired in 2012, Buddy Media provided tools for managing social media marketing campaigns. It was combined with Radian6 (acquired in 2011) to form the basis for Salesforce’s social media marketing suite within the Marketing Cloud.

4. Pardot - Pardot was acquired through the acquisition of ExactTarget, which had previously acquired Pardot in 2012. Pardot is a key component of Salesforce's B2B marketing offerings, now known as Account-Based Marketing within Marketing Cloud.

5. Radian6 - Acquired in 2011, Radian6 provided social media monitoring tools and technologies. It was merged with Buddy Media to enhance the social media and digital marketing services offered by Salesforce.

6. Rebel - Acquired in 2018, Rebel specialised in interactive email services, allowing users to engage with app-like functionality directly within emails. Its technology has been integrated into the Marketing Cloud to enhance email personalisation capabilities.

7. Datorama - Purchased in 2018, Datorama delivers AI-powered marketing intelligence and analytics capabilities. This acquisition has significantly bolstered Salesforce Marketing Cloud's data analytics and visualisation offerings.

8. Demandware - Acquired in 2016, Demandware was a digital commerce platform that became the backbone of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which is closely integrated with Marketing Cloud to provide a seamless customer experience across e-commerce and marketing platforms.

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Why HubSpot Marketing with SalesForce?

HubSpot started as a marketing automation tool and has grown to become a direct competitor to Salesforce. Notably, HubSpot was a Salesforce customer for a decade before launching its own comprehensive CRM suite. Many Salesforce companies use HubSpot Marketing Hub instead of Salesforce's Marketing Cloud for numerous reasons including: 

For Salesforce customers, choosing HubSpot Marketing Hub can provide an excellent balance of simplicity, cost-efficiency, and specialised marketing capabilities, particularly for SMEs or those heavily invested in inbound marketing strategies. The decision to use HubSpot over Salesforce Marketing Cloud will largely depend on specific business needs, budget, team expertise, and the desired level of integration across marketing and CRM platforms.

• Complementary Strengths: Many global companies that use Salesforce for CRM continue to choose HubSpot for their marketing needs due to HubSpot’s superior ease of use, focused marketing tools, and strong inbound marketing capabilities.
• Enhanced Marketing Focus: HubSpot excels in areas such as content marketing, lead nurturing, sales and marketing alignment and conversion rate optimisation, aligning closely with inbound marketing methodologies. This makes it an excellent supplement to Salesforce, particularly for companies looking to enhance their inbound marketing efforts.

A Salesforce customer might consider using HubSpot Marketing Hub over Salesforce Marketing Cloud for several strategic reasons, particularly if their needs align more closely with the unique capabilities and strengths that HubSpot offers. Here are some key considerations: 

All-in-One Marketing Platform

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a powerful set of features, it consists of several different components acquired through various mergers and acquisitions, which can sometimes result in a less integrated experience. HubSpot, by contrast, was built from the ground up as an integrated platform, ensuring that its various tools—such as blogging, email marketing, CRM, and social media management—work seamlessly together. This can lead to a more cohesive user experience and simpler data management. 

Unlike Salesforce, which offers a vast range of marketing products often from various acquisitions, HubSpot Marketing Hub consolidates key marketing functions—like email, lead scoring, social media, SEO, and content management—into a single, cohesive platform. This integration simplifies the management and analysis of marketing campaigns.

Salesforce integration

HubSpot integrates smoothly with Salesforce CRM, allowing data to sync bi-directionally. This means that businesses can continue using Salesforce’s powerful CRM capabilities while leveraging HubSpot’s marketing automation tools. This integration facilitates a synergy between sales and marketing processes, ensuring alignment and efficiency without requiring companies to compromise on the depth of features in their Sales CRM. HubSpot’s out of the box integration with Salesforce is robust, offering extensive syncing capabilities for standard objects such as leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities and cases, as well as custom objects. This allows for a fast, reliable, and powerful connection between the two platforms without the need for technical setup, enhancing the functionality of both systems. 

Cost-Effectiveness (Starting from £700 Per Month)

HubSpot offers a range of pricing tiers, starting from a free tier that provides significant value for small businesses just beginning their digital marketing efforts. Even its more advanced tiers generally come at a significantly lower cost compared to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, making HubSpot a more cost-effective choice for companies mindful of budget constraints. HubSpot Marketing Hub starts at £700 per month, offering a competitive pricing model that is appealing to businesses looking to get robust marketing tools without a significant initial investment.

User-Friendy & Powerful

HubSpot is widely recognised for its user-friendly interface and straightforward usability. This makes it an attractive option for businesses that may not have large specialised teams to manage complex platforms. HubSpot simplifies the process of setting up and managing marketing campaigns, which can be particularly advantageous for small to medium-sized businesses or those with less technical expertise. HubSpot is celebrated for its clean and intuitive interface, making it particularly accessible for marketers of all levels. HubSpot provides powerful marketing capabilities, but it maintains ease of use, avoiding the complexity that can come with Salesforce’s extensive product options.

Inbound Marketing Specialisation

HubSpot is renowned for pioneering the inbound marketing methodology, which focuses on attracting customers through content and interactions that are relevant and helpful. For businesses that are particularly focused on inbound tactics—such as content marketing, SEO, and lead nurturing—HubSpot provides specialised tools and analytics designed specifically for these activities.

Advanced Marketing Automation and Personalisation

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud is highly capable in these areas, HubSpot offers intuitive tools for automation and personalisation that are accessible to marketers without deep technical skills. HubSpot’s workflows for automation and its smart content features allow businesses to easily create personalised experiences for their audiences, which can drive higher engagement and conversions.

Streamlined Lead Management

• Seamless Data Transfer: Leads generated in HubSpot can be automatically synced to Salesforce, ensuring that sales teams have access to up-to-date lead information without manual data entry.
• Enhanced Lead Scoring: Combining HubSpot's behavioral data with Salesforce's customer interaction data allows for more accurate lead scoring, helping sales prioritise their efforts on the most promising leads.

Aligned Sales and Marketing Efforts

• Unified Customer View: The integration provides a complete view of each customer’s journey from first contact through conversion and beyond, fostering better alignment between marketing and sales strategies.
• Consistent Messaging: Marketing can create content and campaigns based on comprehensive data from both platforms, ensuring that messaging is consistent across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Improved Customer Segmentation

• Detailed Insights: Marketers can use detailed data from Salesforce, such as purchase history and customer interactions, combined with HubSpot's engagement data to create more targeted campaigns.
• Personalised Marketing: This detailed segmentation allows for highly personalised marketing efforts, which can lead to increased engagement and conversion rates.

Enhanced Reporting and Analytics

• Holistic Performance Metrics: Integration allows companies to report on marketing and sales metrics in a holistic way, providing a clearer picture of the overall business performance.
• ROI Measurement: Marketers can directly see the impact of specific campaigns on sales outcomes, helping to measure and optimise the return on investment (ROI) more accurately.

Increased Productivity

• Automation of Tasks: Automating tasks such as lead entry and data syncing saves time and reduces errors, allowing sales and marketing teams to focus on strategy and customer engagement.
• Efficient Lead Nurturing: Marketing can automate lead nurturing campaigns in HubSpot based on data from Salesforce, ensuring leads are engaged and warmed up for sales at the right time.

Scalability

• Flexible Adaptation: As business needs grow and evolve, both HubSpot and Salesforce scale to meet increased demands without significant changes to existing workflows.
• Customisation: Both platforms offer extensive customisation options, allowing businesses to tailor the tools to their specific needs.

Improved Customer Retention

• Follow-up Campaigns: Post-sale interactions can be managed through HubSpot by triggering marketing campaigns based on purchase behavior logged in Salesforce.
• Customer Feedback and Support: Integrating feedback from Salesforce into HubSpot campaigns can help in retaining customers by addressing their concerns and improving product or service offerings.

By integrating HubSpot Marketing Hub with Salesforce, businesses not only bridge the gap between their marketing and sales teams but also create a more cohesive, data-driven environment that enhances every touchpoint along the customer journey. This strategic alliance empowers companies to leverage their combined strengths, maximising efficiency and driving growth.

Free HubSpot Marketing Hub Trial !!!!

HubSpot offers a free trial making it easy to create a sandbox test enviroment between SalesForce & HubSpot to see how the software programs integrate together. HubSpot offers a free trial period, allowing potential users to evaluate the platform’s features and user experience firsthand without any financial commitment.

Choosing HubSpot as a marketing platform for Salesforce leverages the strengths of both platforms. HubSpot offers an intuitive, powerful, and streamlined marketing solution that complements Salesforce’s robust CRM capabilities, making it an ideal choice for businesses aiming to optimise their sales and marketing strategies effectively.

A Brief list of HubSpot Marketing Features and Capabilities

HubSpot Marketing Hub offers a robust array of features designed to streamline and enhance every aspect of digital marketing, from lead acquisition to customer retention. Here's a brief list of some of the marketing features of HubSpot used to build a comprehensive marketing strategy:

• Email Marketing and SMS Marketing: Execute targeted and personalised campaigns, using advanced segmentation to reach the right audience at the right time.
• Ad Management & Social Media: Manage and optimise social media profiles and advertisements, enabling consistent engagement and brand visibility across multiple platforms.
• Lead Scoring and Nurturing: Automatically score leads based on their interaction and engagement, and nurture them through automated workflows tailored to their stage in the buyer’s journey.
• List Segmentation and Custom Properties: Segment lists based on user behaviour and custom attributes, allowing for more targeted marketing efforts.
• Traffic Source Analysis: Gain detailed insights into where your traffic is coming from—be it organic search, direct visits, social media, referrals, or paid ads. This segmentation allows you to allocate your marketing efforts more effectively, focusing on the channels that drive the most valuable traffic.
• Website Traffic Analytics: Monitor and analyse the performance of your website, optimising content based on SEO insights to improve search engine rankings
• Website Performance Monitoring: Track and analyse key metrics such as page views, session duration, and bounce rates to understand how users interact with your website. This data helps identify high-performing pages and areas for improvement, enabling you to refine your content and layout for better user engagement.
• Visitor Behaviour Tracking: Understand visitor behaviour through the user journey by monitoring how they navigate your site. Use this information to optimise conversion paths and personalise the user experience, aiming to increase conversion rates and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Campaign Reporting: Track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and events, gathering data to refine strategies and improve ROI.
• Marketing Asset Reporting and Custom Reporting: Evaluate the performance of different marketing assets and create custom reports to dive deeper into analytics.
• Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Integration: Engage with customers directly through popular messaging apps, integrating these interactions into the broader marketing strategy.
• Dynamic Personalisation and Smart Content for Marketing Email: Deliver content that adapts to the interests and past behaviour of users, ensuring relevance and enhancing engagement.
• ABM Tools and Automation and Omni-channel Marketing Automation: Deploy targeted account-based marketing strategies and automate marketing tasks across all channels, ensuring a cohesive and integrated approach.
• Video Hosting & Management and YouTube Analytics Integration: Host marketing videos directly on HubSpot and analyse their performance on YouTube to maximise engagement.
• Salesforce Custom Object Sync: Seamlessly integrate with both standard and custom Salesforce objects for enhanced CRM capabilities
• Marketplace Integrations: As with Salesforce App Exchange, the HubSpot Marketplace has thousands of integrations 
• Google Search Console Integration: and with Google Search Console for insights into search performance.
• Cookie Management Tools: Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations by managing cookie preferences and consents effectively.
• Behavioural Event Reporting and Customer Journey Analytics: Monitor customer behaviours and analyse their journeys to tailor marketing efforts more effectively.
• Multi-touch Revenue Attribution, Contact & Deal Create Attribution: Attribute revenue to the specific touchpoints and marketing activities that influenced customer decisions.
• Multi-Language Content and A/B Testing: Cater to a global audience with content in various languages and test different versions of your web pages to determine which performs best.
• Permission Sets and Custom Events: Manage user permissions effectively and create custom events to track specific interactions within your marketing funnel.
• Calculated Properties and Dynamic Personalisation: Use calculated data fields to inform personalised marketing tactics, dynamically tailoring content and interactions based on user data.
• Forms, Live Chat & Bots: Facilitate direct interactions with customers, collecting data and responding to enquiries in real-time, thereby enhancing the user experience.

HubSpot Marketing Hub’s comprehensive toolset not only facilitates a wide range of marketing activities but also integrates them into a cohesive system that enhances every touchpoint of the customer experience. This platform empowers marketers to deploy sophisticated, data-driven strategies with ease, driving growth and improving customer engagement in a scalable manner.

The Benefits of Integrating HubSpot Marketing Hub and SalesForce

Integrating HubSpot Marketing Hub with Salesforce offers a range of benefits that can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of both sales and marketing teams within a company. Below is an extensive list of these benefits, illustrating how the integration can drive better alignment, streamline processes, and boost overall business performance.

Data Synchronisation

• Bidirectional Sync: Ensures that data objects (leads, contacts, customer accounts, deals, activities) with their respective fields are consistently up-to-date across both platforms, reducing discrepancies and data entry errors.
• Real-Time Updates: Changes in one system are immediately reflected in the other, enabling real-time data access and decision-making.

Enhanced Lead Management

• Lead Capture and Segmentation: Leads generated via HubSpot's inbound marketing tools are automatically captured in Salesforce, allowing for sophisticated segmentation based on engagement, behaviour, and demographics.
• Lead Scoring: Both platforms contribute data for comprehensive lead scoring, helping sales prioritise leads based on their likelihood to convert.

Streamlined Sales Funnel

• Seamless Handoffs: The integration facilitates smooth transitions of leads from marketing to sales, ensuring no leads fall through the cracks during the handover process.
• Lead Nurturing: HubSpot's marketing automation tools can continue to nurture leads in the sales pipeline, delivering targeted content and messages tailored to the sales stage.

Closed-loop Reporting

• ROI Measurement: Marketers can directly link closed sales back to the initiating marketing activities in HubSpot, providing clear insights into campaign effectiveness and marketing ROI.
• Enhanced Analytics: Both teams can access shared analytics for a comprehensive view of the customer journey and interactions across all touchpoints.

Improved Sales Efficiency

• Data Accessibility: Sales teams have immediate access to a lead’s history of interactions with marketing content, enabling more informed conversations and personalised sales strategies.
• Sales Enablement: Marketing can equip sales with content, data, and insights stored in HubSpot to better engage potential buyers.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

• Shared Goals and Metrics: Both teams operate with a unified view of goals and KPIs, ensuring efforts are aligned towards common business objectives.
• Feedback Loop: Sales feedback on lead quality and customer conversations can inform and refine marketing strategies and content.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing

• Holistic View of the Customer: Integrated customer data offers a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle, from first touch to post-sale interactions.
• Targeted Upsell and Cross-sell Campaigns: Marketing can leverage detailed customer data in Salesforce to craft personalised offers and promotions in HubSpot.

Agility and Responsiveness

• Adaptive Campaigns: Marketers can quickly adjust campaigns based on sales outcomes and feedback, improving the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts.
• Proactive Engagement: Real-time data enables both teams to respond swiftly to customer actions and market changes.

Advanced Personalisation

• Dynamic Content: Utilise customer data from Salesforce in HubSpot to create dynamic, personalised content that adapts based on user behaviour and preferences.
• Automated Personalisation Across Channels: Execute personalised marketing campaigns across email, web, social media, and more, based on CRM data.

Regulatory Compliance and Data Management

• Data Integrity: Maintaining data in both systems through automatic syncing helps ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
• Granular Control: Permission settings in Salesforce can be reflected in HubSpot to control data access and maintain security.

Cost Efficiency

• Reduced IT Overhead: Minimise costs related to managing separate systems and reduce the need for custom integrations.
• Maximise Investment: Leverage existing investments in both platforms more effectively, enhancing the value derived from each.

Integrating HubSpot Marketing Hub with Salesforce not only maximises the strengths of both platforms but also provides a comprehensive toolset that drives more coordinated and customer-centric business strategies. This integration is key for businesses looking to leverage advanced digital marketing tactics seamlessly alongside robust CRM functionalities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Salesforce's ascent to becoming the most popular sales tool globally is backed by its robust functionality, extensive customisation options, and its strategic acquisitions which have continuously enhanced its Marketing Cloud. While the comprehensive capabilities of Salesforce's marketing suite offer advanced solutions for diverse marketing needs, they come with their own challenges, including complexity and potential high costs. For companies considering Salesforce, it's crucial to evaluate the specific needs against the offerings and potential investment, ensuring that the benefits align with the business goals and budget. As the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, Salesforce remains a pivotal tool for companies aiming to innovate and excel in their marketing and sales endeavours.